ALotness

"To be a flower, is profound responsibility."

Emily Dickinson

Whenever we construct a concept for a particular experience, it becomes more easy, more efficient, for us to predict (conceptualize) situations and create related “instances of emotion” (Lisa Feldman Barrett).

I have often felt out of tune with others, as if I missed crucial parts of myself within the interaction. A mix of alienation, disconnection, disorientation, a lack of direction also. What am I doing here? Who am I? Why do other people seem to deny the emotional undercurrent that to me is so abundantly present, the pregnant silence we need to talk about to actualize whatever is virtual in this meeting?

This experience, I might call it ‘Lotlessness.’

Now that I have a word for it, it comes with an alluring preciseness. Now I know what I was experiencing! Painfully, but understandably. I would add: feelingly.

All those moments of feeling “too much” yet not having anyway of letting this "too much" just flow within the interconnection. Lotlessness.

Not so long ago, I got to know someone more intensely with whom I have quite a lot in common. We share interests, passions, have been studying comparable topics, are part of several overlapping social networks, and our values seem to resonate quite strongly. It was quite rare for me to experience so much interconnection, so making sense out of this appeared challenging. The intensity of resonance made me seek answers. How can I conceptualize this? My brain, if you will, sure was eager to give a name to this connection. That is efficient and will make the whole relational dynamic much more predictable….

In a certain way, this connection is the opposite of “lotlessness.” It draws me in, also because relatively recent situations in my life came with many different instances of “lotlessness.” In other words, my body was ready to receive new sources of life energy. It was in need.

I might call this particular connection “Alotness.” Although this word remains rather abstract, it does paint a (humorously) precise picture of something that we have in common, that resonates also with the perception that others might construct of both of us. If asked, many would represent both of us as people who are ‘a lot,’ difficult to pinpoint, complex, and (yes, yes of course) intense.

In this process of connecting with each other, my experience is that I keep on trying to create a shared social reality out of this “alotness.” These attempts are also important, because once I, or we, got something conceptualized, this would demand less energy and would make this connection in a sense also less threatening (a.k.a. more predictable).

But it is not an easy job, I tell you. It is almost “too much”! Ah, what a life lesson…

The process is humbling me to see how intimacy works, how it can feel like, and also how having this raw sense of intimacy can shake up one’s complete mental-emotional system by a lack of predictability. It is a paradigm shift, ironically precisely because very intimate paradigms now lay bare on the experiential surface.

Here is someone that, due to an amazing interaction between interoception, learned concepts and experienced social realities, seems to feel A LOT of what I am feeling. My life story of being quite alone in this manner is now turned over by my confirming chin anytime I hear the other person speak about what is emotionally going on in a situation, or what could be creatively interesting to do, or what kind of unfolding might be happening in the world, or….

To create a hospitable space for this “alotness” to find its own quality without running the risks of taming it too soon according to dominant cultural concepts, my own challenge is to allow the connection to grow within the acknowledged boundaries (emphasizing that we are and will remain “connected yet different”) of a nonetheless rather big space of possibilities. So, hopefully, neither of us feels unbearably threatened to lose ourselves within this “alotness” (no threat of “lotlessness”), and both of us feel challenged and teased enough to keep on doing research in the relational dynamic.

Ahhh.. can I think up a concept for this dynamic?

“No-onelotness”! Ha! Or we are “lotying,”.... associating it a little bit too much with the lottery, though.

Well, I am starting to be a little bit too self-referential, don’t you think? (seeing my nick name is Lot) This person hits me hard in the heart area, I can’t seem to disengage from self-referring ways of being alive and together.

We have something here called Love. And like we all know, Love has many different shapes, forms, colors, dynamics, …And Love is often not what we have been taught it is.

“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things…. and recognize the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind.”

Nick Cave

I feel grateful for the fact that this person is willing to be open towards the process. And for myself for doing so also. I notice myself feeling scared at times by the complexity and intensity of it, experiencing difficulty in doing what I preach (on the website of my company A Lot of Complexity):

“Appreciate the complexity of the world and don’t shrink from it.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

The diminishing of predictability makes the relational dynamics emotionally taxing. And increasing predictability makes it awkwardly intimate, either because of a more intense sense of closeness or because of the sadness accompanying new distance between us. Like attachment dynamics, fear of commitment and fear of abandonment do their “attachi-dance”.

What do we have in common? Is what is resonating between us also a reflection of some emotional undercurrent created by the way we were both brought up? What kind of undesirable attachment dynamics are part of that enticing resonance? Is this something I want in my life, or are these emotions based on faulty projections stemming from the past? Am I misattributing love to the forms of predictability I was used to when growing up, even if they were not that good for my wellbeing? How can we distinguish these projections from vitalizing forms of intimacy? What kind of journey are we going through here?

I do my emotional work. Time and space allow for discernment.

“Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.”

Iris Murdoch

What do we keep close, what do we lay aside? I do not know yet. Surely, are patterns of dysfunctional family life are part of this bubbling and at the same time unusually normal connection. It is vulnerable. It is catalyzing me to put more boundaries into place, reorganizing other relationships and how they were impacted by projections. This is what is happening. Alotness!

I bow to the flow of life, its overpowering motions, the notion that I cannot decide what this interconnection is precisely, the way this process teaches me to be humble and thankful for any kind of direction it takes, the sheer experience of deep connection it allows me to be with. The “alotness” of it… At times, leaving me only three words reiterating in my mind: I love you. And yes, I do, even if having no clue…Thanks for being you!

These kind of connections seem to be magical.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?”

[…]

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain. […] Even after the brain receives electrical signals, its task is not complete. This wave must still be interpreted as the sound of a toppling tree. For this, the brain needs the concept of “tree” and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest. This concept can come from prior experience with trees, or from learning about trees in a book, or from another person’s description. Without the concept, there is no crashing timber, only the meaningless noise of experiential blindness.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett

You see, this connection offers a depth of reality I could only intuit that was there. There is new intensity and complexity of shared reality here. Now I can hear my own voice in the silenced silence. By hearing this voice, thanks to the finetuned, adaptive listening of the other, I notice other sounds as well. Silence is speaking to me in ways impossible before. Thanks to this meeting of bodies-in-minds, the emergence of minds, I can surrender to a new reality of being me. Less loneliness, less lotlessness, or new ways of lotlessness, also leading to more alotness; a gateway for new nuances and layers of reality to be experienced.

This connection is teaching me how to be the best, unique, version of myself. Different, yet connected. Self-expansion. It is drawing me towards a deeper source of life energy than I have accessed up till now. It is allowing me to be as energetic as I am. It is like a container for the process of self-actualization.

“The perilous time for the gifted is not youth. The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”

Elizabeth Peabody

This connection is actually training me in being highly gifted once more. It is exciting a beingness into a becomingness. It is refreshing my dreams, intensifying my strengths, allowing me to accept the experience of a calling, porous yet firm as it is.

“Self comes to be through the contact with other which is mutually transformative, and which does not leave both sides as they were.”

Andreas Weber

What more could I ask for? What can I give so that this “gift” I am experiencing here is reciprocal? Just the hearing-together is silencing the need to answer this question. This connection is making me “fall in love with the where I am” (paraphrasing Jeff Foster).

This is quite (an) a-lot-ness. A-live-ness unfolding right now, right here. It is a love teaching me to be patient, generous, undemanding, honest, open, self- critical, daring, present, committed, authentic,...

This way, much more “a-live love” is flowing into other connections. The process enticing me to ask the following question:

“Do you hear the flowers sing?” (read this article about giftednes and relationships).

This connection is inspiring me to write poetry. Because:

“Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.”

Donald Hall

This connection offers me tears, those deeply healing ones. The grief that allows the lover-within-me to rise up from depths unknown before.

Eventually, this connection is teaching me to be radically tender:

“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’”

Olga Tokarczuk

It is an interaction which comes with the birth of a particular kind of genius, stroked into being. Boldy spoken, rooted in the most intimate realms of experience though:

"Genius is both a specific gift and a possibility that has not yet occurred; it is not fixed internal commodity to be exploited and brought to the surface, but a conversation to be followed, deepened, understood and celebrated. Genius is the meeting between inheritance and horizon, between what has been told, what can be told and what is yet to be told, between our practical abilities and our relationship to the gravitational mystery that pulls on us. Our genius is to understand and stand beneath the set of stars present at our birth, and from that place to seek the hidden, single star, over the night horizon, we did not know we were following."

David Whyte

You see Lot, this connection is showing me a Lot.

Photo: Annelore Bensink. I chose this photo because I feel my posture reflects the birth of something vulnerable (the intense moments prior to "flowering", the genius about to be born. The period in which this photo was taken is also part of the process I wrote about in the post.)